What's Necessary?

Ross Perot's Glib Gab Shows That He Just Doesn't Get It

Ross Perot remains popular in the polls despite, or perhaps because of, an economic message that is simplistic, superficial and totally unrelated to the perennial problems of actually governing.

It's the thrust of what he is saying that has public appeal, not the specifics, of which there are few. It amounts to a warning to keep the taxes and spending down, and who could quarrel with that?

Perot himself is wearing thin in Washington, where his pompous testimony before Congress and his trumped-up polls designed to show public support for him are viewed with the scorn they deserve.

He keeps saying things that real-life politicians who have to make real-life decisions find silly. But neither the president nor anyone else is eager to take him to task publicly unless truly pressed, out of fear of offending his supporters.

Unlike the Senate Republicans, who knew exactly what they were about when they defeated the president's stimulus package, for instance, Perot ridiculed the bill but never grasped what was in it.

His recent appearance on NBC's Meet the Press was a classic example of his glib gab.

Perot complained that the president's bill would not have produced jobs, as the president claimed, but only make-work or non-job jobs. This is an easy shot, when aimed at the section of the bill that would have given communities grants for wish lists that included those infamous comforts of the sporting life: alpine slides and warming huts.

But then Perot was asked if repairing and building bridges and highways, for which the bill also called, did not require actual work. Perot babbled on about how most of that work too would be wasted, because it would not be done on repairing ''real infrastructure.''

Sweeping generalities must come closer to the nub of what governing is all about than Perot manages to do.

He makes a distinction between what is ''needed'' and what isn't. He would build those bridges that are essential and not build those that aren't.

And here we get to a fundamental difference between reality and fantasy.

It is cute to say that some politically neutral expert should decide the relative merits of what gets built and what doesn't get built. Warming huts don't sound terribly essential.

But how does one know whether a rural passageway that provides the only route to market for a few hundred farmers is as important as another lane for a fast-speed highway carrying hundreds of thousands of commuters a day?

We all know about those roads that lead to the doorways of governors and members of Congress and nowhere else. Believe it or not, those are rare.

Mostly the choices between what to build and not to build are made between equally legitimate, competing interests. The nation's crumbling infrastructure has been an inadequately addressed scandal for many years.

There is no standard definition for ''necessary,'' only parochial views about what is useful for various people in various regions. And in a democracy, the elected representatives of those regions rightfully demand their share of the action. Why should they vote for stuff their taxpayers help pay for that goes only to other folks?

But Perot doesn't get it, or doesn't admit he does, because that would complicate his theme. It would, in fact, ruin it.

Question: ''You're saying you don't want to put through anything that might help an individual congressman that therefore might help it get passed?

Perot: ''No, I didn't say that. You said that.''

Q: ''That's the political reality.''

P: ''No, forget it. Is the bridge needed?''

Q: ''Period?''

P: ''Sure.''

The question of what is ''necessary'' to do, and who decides what that is, is at the heart of politics and governing in this administration, and indeed all administrations. And, like so much of life, it is always in the eye of the beholder.

It is impossibly tedious for presidents, presidential candidates or would-be presidential advisers to publicly debate the relative merits of this bridge versus that one. But sweeping generalities must come closer to the nub of what governing is all about than Perot manages to do.

So far, according to pollsters, the public likes Perot more than ever. It may well be because he is seen as a nice provocative thorn in the side of politicians, who no doubt deserve all the thorns they get.

But in a new poll reported by The Washington Post, 46 percent of those surveyed say they would consider voting for Perot for president. ''Consider,'' of course, is not the same thing as a commitment to vote. Thank goodness.